The overarching aim for this ambitious programme of research is to lead a step-change in capabilities for robust scientific appraisal of new and existing alcohol policy interventions by substantially developing and updating the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model also known as SAPM.

The team

The multidisciplinary team comprises academics and researchers from:

The University of Sheffield’s Alcohol Research Group (lead)

University of Kent

The Institute for Fiscal Studies

University of East Anglia Business School

University of Loughborough Business School

We are also assisted by an international advisory groupof world-leading alcohol epidemiology, sociology and policy researchers as well as policy stakeholders in England and Scotland. For more information on our team members, please click here.

The project

The IARP project is divided into five main work packages and brief summaries of these are provided below:

WP1: New evidence to inform price and taxation policy appraisal and evaluation.

Here we seek to update and develop existing functionality within SAPM. In particular we aim to:

Analyse supermarket pricing data to identify patterns in the pass through of alcohol duty and VAT increases to prices faced by consumers;

Use alcohol spending diary data to develop new econometric models linking changes in price and changes in demand for different types of alcoholic beverages (see discussion paper);

Revise the structure of SAPM to enable enhanced analysis of alcohol pricing policies including greater flexibility for users in specifying populations subgroups for which results are available and new capabilities to appraise taxation policies;

Review the most recent published evidence and conduct new analyses to update risk functions linking consumption and risk of harms within SAPM, particularly around subgroup-specific risks, risks from binge drinking, time lags between consumption and harm, and evidence of beneficial affects to health and well-being from alcohol consumption (see publication on time lags);

Examine sources of bias in estimates of alcohol consumption from household survey and customs and excise data and develop methods for adjusting consumption data used in SAPM to account for this (see publication).

WP2: Dynamic modelling to account for trends and lags with evidence and calibration

This work package aims to transform the existing version of SAPM into a comprehensive dynamic model accounting for a range of individual- and population-level trends. We aim to:

Use cohort data to identify different individual trajectories of alcohol consumption across the life course;

Conduct age, period and cohort analyses of alcohol consumption data;

Use the above analyses to forecast future population-level trends in alcohol consumption and alcohol-related harms and incorporate these trends into SAPM so model predictions rely on fewer ceteris paribus assumptions

WP3: Enabling appraisal of availability policies and policy mix

There is uncertainty over the strength and magnitude of the relationship between availability of alcohol and consumption. We aim to make a step-change to UK availability and affordability analysis by:

Defining measures of spatial and temporal availability of alcohol which are theoretically, empirically and policy relevant;

Use UK outlet data with detailed outlet characteristics and granular spatial information to quantifying the relationship between those availability measures and measures of alcohol consumption;

Incorporate alcohol availability measures into SAPM’s econometric model to enable the joint impact of alcohol pricing and availability policies to be estimated.

WP4: The effect of policy context

Here we aim to conduct exploratory analyses which seek to establish the broader contextual factors which impact on the effectiveness of alcohol policies in different times and places and to explore the feasibility of methods for quantifying those impacts. We will:

Review literature to identify specific political and societal factors influencing effectiveness of availability and pricing policies;

Use a systematic review of alcohol price elasticities to investigate whether the impact of individual context factors can be quantified.

WP5: Policy analysis and validation

Developments in our methods of modelling alcohol policies have frequently come about because a policy question needed answering. IARP incorporates a 3-year programme of policy appraisal which is responsive to stakeholder needs. We aim to provide timely reports on evidence synthesis, model developments, validations and policy analyses to enable researchers and policy stakeholders in the UK and internationally to view and use developing work.

Examples of this include:

Updated appraisals of alcohol pricing policies for the Scottish Government

A public response (with appendix) to critiques of SAPM which were commissioned by the Scotch Whisky Association.

New analysis of income-specific impacts of minimum unit pricing for the UK Government